When using a number of external USB storages devices you may have found the drive letters are dynamically assigned when you connect them. Most of the time this is fine, however if you use multiple USB storage devices or mix and match frequently – the inconsistent state of drive lettering can be problematic. Fortunately, this can be resolved by assigning fixed drive letters to your devices.

First off, go into Control Panel, then Administrative Tools, Computer Management, then in the left hand pane find the Storage area and click on Disk Management. Alternatively, click Start, Run then type diskmgmt.msc

Next, insert the USB drives you want to work with and they should appear in the disk management window. In the image above we can see two USB drives have been detected, Disk 1 and Disk 2. Disk 1, as Delia is fond of saying, “is one we prepared earlier” and will always come up as Drive G. However, look at Disk 2 – there is no predefined drive letter so it will be dynamically assigned.

Right click on Disk 2 and choose “Change Drive Letter and Paths…” from the context menu. The box underneath the message “Allow access to this volume by using the following drive letter and paths:” will most likely be empty so click the Add button. From the next dialog box headed “Add Drive Letter or Path” pull down the list of drive letters on the right hand side and choose an appropriate drive letter. When done, click OK.

When you return to Drive Management window the changes should be reflected and will be maintained from that point forward, so next time you connect the external drive you should have a little consistency back.

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